Favorite Teams

Beaverton School District graduation and dropout rates come out Thursday morning for the class of 2013. Here, two members of the Beaverton High class of 2014 take a final in June Katie Phillips works through her Spanish final in teacher Jennifer Hull's class on the last day of school. Next to her is Paige Harris.
(Wendy Owen/Beaverton Leader)

Graduation rates released: Watch Oregonlive.com/Beaverton for the annual graduation and dropout rate data released by the Oregon Department of Education Thursday morning. Did Beaverton’s class of 2013 make gains or lose ground in the quest to graduate all students? The story will include links to The Oregonian’s Your Schools page, listing all districts and schools in the state.

TELL all: Beaverton Superintendent Jeff Rose told the school board on Monday that the Oregon Department of Education will be administering a statewide survey of educators to get a better sense of teaching and learning conditions from folks in the trenches.

The Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning (TELL) Oregon Survey will be administered from Feb 24 to March 24 to all licensed educators, which include teachers, counselors, principals and other administrators.

The anonymous surveys will be analyzed and each school will receive its own results as will the state. Results are expected at the end of April or early May.

Absenteeism: The Oregonian’s Betsy Hammond examines the effect of student absences on their education. The five-part series, "Empty Desks: Oregon's absenteeism epidemic," starts Thursday and will feature data on nearly every school in Oregon. It will reveal a host of surprising and distressing findings about how many students miss weeks of school every year -- and how many schools turn a blind eye to a problem chronicled in their own records.

In other education news:

Washington Post: Donald Graham, former owner of The Washington Post, recently helped launch a $25 million scholarship fund for undocumented high school graduates -- the largest such fund in the nation.

Graham joined a top Democratic Party fundraiser and former Republican Cabinet secretary to create "TheDream.US," which aims to award full-tuition scholarships to 1,000 students in the program's first year.